Donald Trump called for the country to go “back to 1798” during a rally showcasing the former president’s full-throated embrace of nativist totalitarianism in the final days of the 2024 campaign cycle.
During a Monday rally in Greenville, North Carolina, the former president railed against undocumented migrants, promising to invoke the Alien Enemies Act — a more than 200-year-old law that grants the president power to arrest, detain, and deport individuals from countries in a stage of war against the United States without standard due process requirements. The act has only ever been invoked in times of war and was most infamously used by President Franklin Roosevelt to detain thousands of Japanese, German, and Italian nationals in internment camps during World War II.
“To expedite the removals of Tren de Aragua and other savage gangs like MS-13,” Trump said on Monday. “I will invoke the Alien Enemies act of 18—, no 1798. That’s when we had real politicians that said, ‘We’re not gonna play games.’ We need to go back to 1798.”
Despite Trump’s claim, the Alien Enemies Act — and three other pieces of legislation comprising the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 — were not universally beloved upon their passage. The Republican Party at the time opposed the laws as a gross violation of civil and due process rights. President Thomas Jefferson called the acts a “detestable” piece of legislation “worthy of the 8th or 9th Century.” Large portions of the law were allowed to lapse, but the Alien Enemies Act remains active, as it had not included an expiration when passed.
In 1798, the enslavement of Black people was still the law of the land, and women could not own property, vote, control their own reproductive choices, or participate in wide swaths of society under the protection of the law. Nevertheless, Trump and the Republican Party regularly fantasize about a return to the times of codified legal repression.
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As Trump threatens to use the military against his political opponents, he’s also been fetishizing a return to the days before the military was “woke,” playing clips of fictional soldiers being verbally abused by a drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket. “We won two world wars with that kind of stuff” he told his audience on Monday.
Trump’s desire to invoke a wartime law to fulfill his dreams of mass deportations of undocumented migrants is dubious legally, but affirmed to his supporters that migrants are invaders, as he characterizes them — and, as he’s put it — “poisoning the blood” of the nation and carrying out a mythical crime wave against its citizenry.
“The United States is now an occupied country,” Trump said on Monday, “but on November 5, we will be a liberated country. We will be liberated like never before. It will be liberation day.”
The former president claimed that North Carolina, which was recently ravaged by Hurricane Helene, was being ransacked by the Biden administration.
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“We will end the looting, ransacking, raping, and pillaging of North Carolina,” he said, repeating false claims that FEMA is illegally squandering disaster relief funds on undocumented migrants.
When Trump speaks of liberation, he speaks of the dissolution of all checks on his own power. Should he prevail on Election Day, the consequences of his vision will not be born by him, his allies, or the elected officials supporting him, but by everyday Americans whose rights will be trampled.
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Publish date : 2024-10-21 11:27:00
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